Pierre Baillot

A shorter (4 hour) version of Out 1, a 12 1/2 hour fusion of lengthy improvised sequences with a modern adaptation of a mystery story by the French writer Balzac, creating a work of constantly shifting meaning. (guardian.co.uk)

The second of two films charting the ordeal of Joan of Arc, Jacques Rivette's Joan the Maid: The Prisons takes the teenage soldier from her greatest triumph to martyrdom. Having liberated Orleans, Joan accompanies the Dauphin to Rheims, where she observes his coronation--but her string of victories soon ends. Her voices and visions leave her, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy discourages her from continuing her campaign. (KG)

The first of Rivette's two films about Joan charts her story from her first revelation through the Battle of Orleans, where the wisp of a girl is both the tough leader rubbing shoulders with foul-mouthed, hot-tempered career soldiers and the blubbering young woman who cries when hit with an arrow. (KG)

Out 1 is about two different theater troupes trying to put on plays by Aeschylus. As the film continues these characters and a few others begin to cross paths and interact.

Berthe Pedret, a simple laundry woman who marries Hector, son of a wealthy, upper class, Spanish immigrant family that owns a successful farm machinery factory. Through a series of vignettes, Techine depicts the passage of years, during which the ambitious working class woman blooms through several bold moves, such as negotiating a workers' strike settlement and using her alliance with the war-time French Resistance movement to increase the enterprise's prestige. (imdb)